Take two, this  time with style
by gibbousmoons
Summary: Sent back to his childhood by accident, a more powerful Naruto is ready to do exactly what he wants to, which is prank the heck out of everybody.  It turns out he's got a -lot- of issues to work through.


**AN:** This is a little drabble about how I think Naruto would act if he found himself in the past. Sure, he'd have the grand goals he does in all the other fics, but I think he'd use it to prank the heck out of everybody first!

Note. Not Bakamoto.

**XIXI: Begin!**

Insert canon here.

**XIXI: Begin again!**

Naruto woke up. Scrubbing the sleep from his eyes, he swung his feet off his bed, a last-second shift to the side saving his left foot from stepping on the squeaking board. Grumbling, the short Hokage dragged himself over to the kitchen in his apartment, the apartment he'd lived in since before he was a genin, and opened the cabinet that held his instant coffee. He reached up, groping around, until he found the last clean mug in the cabinet.

"Note to self, buy more coffee. Or maybe I could just hire someone to open a whole stand. Yeah, that's the first thing on the list today. A Hokage shouldn't have to make his own coffee."

After putting water in the cup, he set it on the stove, then performed the only katon jutsu he was really proficient with, the water boiling jutsu. With a poof of steam, all of the water in the cup evaporated, filling Naruto's kitchen with the smell of burned chicken ramen.

"Really need to get that coffee stand up." The aged shinobi muttered to himself, "Can't do anything when 'm not awake." Continuing his diatribe on the evils of the long hours sitting behind a desk required to govern a village as large as Konoha, he grumpily pulled on a pair of shorts and a shirt, noticing that the only other things in his closet were the orange jumpsuits he kept as mementos of his days in team 7. "Gonna need to do the laundry today too. . . Wonderful".

On his way to the Hokage Tower, Naruto couldn't get rid of the feeling that something was . . .wrong. The villagers were glaring at him. That was normal, he had just raised taxes to cover the restoration costs of the fourth shinobi war.

Naruto frowned; the walk to the tower was taking too long. Well, it wasn't the first time the ANBU had caught him in a genjutsu in a retaliatory prank. On the subject of ANBU, he had seen five different four man squads of them already, and he wasn't really looking. He frowned, and resolved to show them, once again, why they should be stealthy.

Thinking heavily, his diminutive form strode imperiously past the chunin manning the desk in the ground floor of the tower, ignoring the muffled conversations of the administrative staff surrounding him. On reaching his desk, he sat down in the comfortable chair that sat behind the ancient desk and, surprising the ANBU he idly noticed in the room, pulled over the day's paperwork, inked his pen, and began filling out a request for additional funding from the Konohagure Public Library.

It wasn't until he got to the fourth piece of paperwork, an authorization form for a jonin to take a genin team, that he noticed something wrong. Specifically, he noticed the jonin's name.

_Asuma_.

Asuma, who was the teacher for the second Ino-Shika-Cho team.

Asuma, who had been killed years ago.

Naruto calmly got up, tucked in the chair, and looked out a window. 'Yup. Not the Konoha I went to sleep to.' He opened the bottom drawer on the right of his desk, and found the Make Out Paradise calendar hidden beneath a stack of paper and ink requisition forms, and opened it to the date. It was circled in red with the words "Genin Exam" written boldly in the middle of the circle.

**XIXI**

Outside the Hokage's tower, Naruto sat down on a bench and tried to figure out why Konoha had seemingly gone back in time over ten years. 'This isn't a genjutsu, is it?', he held his hands in a ram seal an struggled to mould chakra into a wave "KAI!"

'Not an illusion, I don't get sick, and this is too big for a prank, even for one of mine.' He paced back and forth, thinking frantically.

This means. . . It means. . . _Time Travel_. He could just feel the italics.

"Naruto! You're going to be late for your genin exam!"

"Iruka-sensei!" Naruto had the biggest grin Iruka had ever seen on him, "I was just about to go to the academy to take it! I wasn't gonna be late!" 'I've got to keep things the same until I can get my hands on the Forbidden Scroll and Mizuki tricks me into stealing the Forbidden Scroll or else people will get suspicious, but once I've read the scroll . . . Well, no one can fault Uzumaki Naruto, Kinjutsu prodigy, for being such a fast reader, can they?'

Iruka, ignorant of the scheming underside of his student's seemingly serene mine, had to chuckle at the obviously false scowl Naruto had managed to turn his smile into. "Then hurry up, you don't want to make me late, do you?"

**XIXI**

'Dammit.' Naruto swore in his head. That didn't feel like it was doing the job properly, so he swore out loud. "Dammit!"

'I can't interfere with anything important.' Naruto sped up, walking towards the academy. 'If I change too many things I won't be able to predict what will happen. . . Wait. Genin Exam. Today. _Mizuki_.' And Naruto planned a devious plan.

**XIXI**

"That's right, Naruto! You are the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox!"

'Showtime!' thought Naruto, as he let out a shocked gasp. "No way! Next you're going to try and tell me my dad was the Yondaime and my inheritance was stolen by bitter old men on the civilian counsel!"

Mizuki paused as he drew back his arm, holding his windmill shuriken ready to throw as he continued to banter. "What the hell are you talking about! Yondaime must have done something to you to make you into a baby, but I know the truth, Kyuubi, and I'll be a hero when I kill you!"

Naruto's eyes opened wide in shock, "No way!"

"Yes! I'm going to do it and nobody will care, besides that demon loving brat of a Hyuuga!" Mizuki decided he was having too much fun tormenting the demon while it was helpless, and that it couldn't hurt to degrade the beast verbally before killing it. "You never even noticed she cared about you, did you? I never would have thought such a _mighty_ demon would be so blind, but what would a bijuu know about how real people act?

Ha, look at you! Your shoulders are shaking, is the mighty Kyuubi no Kitsune crying? Is it afraid of death? Well don't worry!" Mizuki threw his shuriken with a sudden burst of motion, cackling madly at Naruto's immanent death.

Which meant he was completely flabbergasted when Naruto, instead of being cut in half by the oversized blade, promptly burst into a cloud of smoke. "Sha- Shadow clone? Heh heh. . ." Mizuki chuckled nervously, pulling a pair of kunai out of his pouch and holding them in his now sweaty hands.

'Why am I nervous? It's just the demon brat, it's just the harmless little demon brat. . ."

"One thing-"

"I can't-"

"figure out-," Naruto's curious voice, curiously, came from different directions almost simultaneously, altering every other word, making the sentence far harder to understand and more confusing than realistically necessary.

"Is why, if I'm a demon, people keep trying to make me miserable? Seems like you'd want to make me _like_ Konoha, instead of wanting to smash it into tiny little pieces."

Mizuki edged sideways, slowly drawing closer to a patch of orange fabric partially concealed behind a tree.

Closer. . .

Closer. . .

Mizuki grinned maniacally in anticipation as he finally drew up behind the little brat- No. Wait. His face fell, and for a brief moment Naruto almost laughed from his hiding place on top of a nearby tree as his erstwhile teacher stared mournfully at the cardboard cutout of Naruto that was hiding behind a bush.

For the record, Mizuki looked like a cross between a kicked puppy and a kicked grizzly bear. It was just the right mix of blank incomprehension, dejection, and quickly building rage that Naruto recognized all too often from his day of pranking as the face of a high-ranking ninja that was just made a fool of by an academy student.

"Hem hem!" came a voice from above, causing Mizuki to stare up into his target's face, which was almost split in half by the gigantic grin displayed prominently beneath his goggles.

**XIXI**

"Hey Iruka-sensei, watch this!" Suddenly, there were hundreds of shadow clones carpeting the clearing, a never ending sea of orange-clad bodies, all glaring at Mizuki.

After a brief moment, the traitor (Mizuki) said, "So you can use the clone jutsu" as he put the over-sized shuriken away and pulled out a pair of kunai, "all that means is that I'm going t have to see which one of you I can actually touch. You filthy little m-oof!"

Eyes bugging out comically, Mizuki fell speechless to the ground, revealing a Naruto standing behind him, hands raised in the classic 'just threw a rabbit punch at the pack of somebody's neck' position, eyes wide, as he whispered in an amazed tone, "I can't believe that actually worked, but do you know what Mizuki-sensei?"

Not waiting for the traitorous teacher to respond, Naruto said, "Mangonnagetblownupsaywhat?"

And, from the ground, Mizuki was suddenly _very_ afraid.

Naruto patted him on his back, smiling cheerfully

**XIXI**

Exploding tags are one of the ubiquitous tools used by ninja throughout the Elemental Nations. An exploding shadow clone, a technique that used the chakra of a shadow clone o replicate the explosive power of a tag, is much less used, mostly because anyone with the chakra reserves to use it effectively usually finds just using explosive tags to be easier.

Naruto never was most ninja, and he could make _hundreds_ of shadow clones with no apparent effort.

He _did_ make several hundred shadow clones.

The blast wave flattened the training ground.

The explosion was seen from the Hokage's Tower.

Naruto thought he should have used more clones.

**AN:** Anybody have any ideas for how Naruto should continue acting? I'm in big favor of him playing along with canon, except pretending that he's gotten the ability to 'forsee' certain things from the Kyuubi.


End file.
